When R. Kikuo Johnson was a child walking
home from Makawao Elementary School on Maui in the early 1990s, he sometimes
spotted local painter Eddie Flotte along the sidewalk doing plein air
watercolors. “I had never seen an artist work before, and as a young kid who
liked to draw, watching Eddie turn dark green globs of watercolor into sunlit
trees was pure magic,” says Johnson. Twenty-some years later, after
establishing himself as a successful artist in his own right, Johnson reached
out to Flotte. Meeting your childhood idols as an adult can be disappointing,
but Johnson’s meeting with Flotte went better than he imagined. “Not only did
he invite me to his studio for a look at his latest work,” Johnson says, “he
sat me down for a three-hour impromptu painting lesson.”

Johnson made a name for himself in 2005 with
the hit graphic novel Night Fisher,
and now his thought-provoking, cartoon-inspired illustrations regularly enliven
publications such as the New Yorker
and the New York Times. He’s become a
Brooklynite, but he returns to Makawao regularly. After Flotte taught him how
to use watercolors, he went back to his parents’ house and did a watercolor
study of their wildly verdant Upcountry yard. It features a pair of soggy work
boots, a centipede crawling along a leaking garden hose, and a kolea (Paciﬁc
golden plover), the closest thing the family has to a pet. The painting hangs
in his parents’ dining room, a gift from a son who—like the kolea—faithfully
returns to Hawai‘i each year.

With his artwork in galleries from New York
to Los Angeles, a growing number of New Yorker covers to his credit and a job
as an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), his alma mater,
Johnson has clearly found his place on the Mainland. Nonetheless, he still
identifies strongly with Hawai‘i. “I feel like I have one foot planted firmly
on Maui and always will,” he says.

At 18, Johnson was excited to leave home for
college, but he found the gray-green East Coast unappealing. “I liked my
classes and made friends, but winter was the worst,” he says. “I one-hundred
percent thought I’d be going right back to Maui after I graduated.” And that
might have been his path if in 2001 he hadn’t gone to Rome to spend his junior
year abroad, which proved to be life-changing in unexpected ways. “The day
after I landed in Italy, it was September 11th and the towers fell,” he says.
Along with the shock of it came a wave of patriotic emotion. “I still had my
identity of being from Hawai‘i—I didn’t lose that—but I had expanded to embrace
being ‘from America’ as well.”

Johnson also had an artistic awakening in
Rome and began writing and sketching what would become his breakthrough work,
the semi-autobiographical Night Fisher.
“Art school is very competitive, so my first two years at RISD, I was proving I
could paint like John Singer Sargent,” he says. But in a more relaxed
environment abroad, Johnson stopped trying to impress. “I remembered why I had
always drawn and the thing that had always appealed to me about art—using my
imagination and telling stories,” he says.

Night Fisher puts a Maui
spin on a classic story of teen disaffection. Two friends begin to drift apart
when one of them starts running with a new crowd and experimenting with drugs,
in this case, crystal methamphetamine. Johnson realized it might be
controversial. “As a writer from Hawai‘i, anything you write that doesn’t ﬁt
the narrative of Hawai‘i as a paradise is going to be a surprise to readers,”
he says.

Night Fisher, which won
the 2006 Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award and the 2006 Harvey Award for
Best New Talent, started as an account of an actual period in Johnson’s life
but then changed direction. “I began writing it as my story, but as I
progressed, I started to fictionalize it to develop some narrative symmetry,”
he says. “I think that’s why I adopted my middle name as my professional name,
Kikuo, to give me some psychological space.” Until then he had gone by Reid.

After graduation, Johnson and a classmate
from Rome, Paolo Rivera, moved to an apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area
of Brooklyn. Rivera, now best known for his award-winning work on the Marvel
comic Daredevil, says Johnson had and
still has a significant influence on him. Before they met, Rivera’s end goal
was simply to become a master draftsman. But Johnson approached art differently
and it rubbed off on Rivera. “He was looking at things through the lens of
subtext,” Rivera says. “Simply drawing things well wasn’t quite enough for him,
and it made me realize maybe it shouldn’t be for me either.”

Johnson had a chance to join Rivera in the
professional world of comic book illustration—his childhood dream job—but he
passed on the opportunity to finish Night
Fisher. To support himself, he returned to the restaurant chain where he
waited tables on Maui as a teenager, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, which happens to
also have a location in Times Square. He expected the book would take him a
year to complete. Instead it took three.

In 2004, when Johnson’s instincts told him
that his lushly drawn, melancholy story was finally finished, he submitted Night Fisher to Fantagraphics Books, a
publisher of comics and graphic novels. “When they accepted it, they said,
‘Just change the cover,’” Johnson says. “It was pretty much exactly as I drew
it, with a few typos and all.” He went from being completely unknown to getting
good reviews and winning awards. Calls and commissions from art directors at
publishing houses, advertising agencies, magazines, newspapers and even a
skateboard company soon followed.

In 2009 Johnson began teaching a class at RISD
called Comics: The Grammar of the Graphic
Novel. On the syllabus he states that we are currently in the “second
golden age of comics.” Comic books and the stories they tell were once
considered to be just for kids and adults with arrested development; they were
lowbrow and uncool. But over the past fifteen years or so, the
illustration-driven medium has tackled subjects including from how to achieve
world peace and how to attain enlightenment. It has also powered an explosion
of blockbuster films and hit television series. Johnson explains that a graphic
novel is like a comic book except it has enough pages (usually more than a
hundred) to merit a spine. It’s also like a comic book in that it is a visual
story told with images, often hand drawn, although many artists, including
Johnson, utilize digital brushes and software such as Cintiq and Photoshop. A
graphic novel also has fewer words than a non-graphic novel, and the tension
between the image and the words forces the reader to be active and involved in
deciphering the story.

Aware that this interplay between image and
words could help kids learning to read, Francoise Mouly, art editor at the New
Yorker since 1993, founded Toon Books, a publishing company specializing in
hardcover comic books for early readers. When Mouly approached Johnson about
trying his hand at a children’s book, he looked to the Hawaiian legends he
loved while growing up. His second book, The
Shark King, published in 2012, focuses on Kamohoali‘i’s half-mortal son,
Nanaue. Johnson says he read every version of the story that he could get his
hands on, deciding to focus on Nanaue’s experience as a child given in W.D.
Westervelt’s 1916 book, Hawaiian Legends of Ghosts and Ghost-Gods. “I did not
want to dumb it down for kids—I wanted to keep some of the horror and
alienation in the story.” And he did. The result is an almost psychedelic
rendering of precontact Hawai‘i and a portrait of a mischievous child longing
for his absent father while discovering his own unique appetites and abilities.

“He did a magnificent job—he is such a great
observer and researcher,” says Mouly. “The plants look like some kind of fever
dream, and the story is resonant with the longing and the heartbreak of the
unknowable parent—a reality for many kids.” The clean lines of his execution
combined with the emotionally nuanced quality of his writing is what Mouly
finds unique and impressive about Johnson’s work. She points to the cover
illustration Johnson did for a May 2016 issue of the New Yorker, titled “Commencement.”
It depicts a class of 2016, merrily dispersing after its graduation ceremony;
meanwhile, a member of the class of 2015, now working as a groundskeeper,
cleans up after the event. The image, Mouly says, is “at once a celebration of
the New England landscape and a story triangulated between three figures—the
2015 graduate raking the caps out of the trees and the 2016 graduate, walking
across the lawn with his companion. It is so rich. There is what you see first,
what you see when you look again—a discoverable, ha-ha moment when the reader
gets the joke and feels complicit. The reader is invested in making it come to
life.”

It’s an example of how a single thoughtful
drawing can cut through the hundreds of thousands of images we are barraged
with each day, Mouly says. “It’s been very gratifying to see how a single image
can stay in people’s mind with the New Yorker covers,” she says. “People save
them, some even put them on the wall and live with them.”

Anyone under the age of 30 might find it hard
to imagine what life was like in pre-internet Hawai‘i, when growing up in a
sleepy Pacific Island town meant not just limited access to news of the world,
pop culture trends and the exploits of celebrities, but also limited interest
in these things. Reflecting on his childhood, Johnson sees advantages to being
at a distance from the mainstream. “I’m grateful that my parents didn’t sign me
up for soccer or piano lessons. They just brought me printer paper, and since
it’s always raining in Makawao, I’d just sit inside and draw,” he says.
John-son laughs about the stacks and stacks of comics he illustrated with his
own made-up Maui superheroes, such as Wind Man. But it helped him develop his
artistic skills and his imagination.

His advice to other artists: “You have to be
able to create your own content. Waiting around for your dream job will never
work. You have to find and express your voice explicitly for anyone else to
notice it.”

The problem for Johnson now is that his
illustrating hand and artistic voice might be a little too popular. Or maybe
the cost of living in New York City is a little too expensive. Either way he
finds himself working even during his winter sojourns to Maui (thanks,
internet), which leaves little time for his personal work: a new graphic novel
he’s kind of hush-hush about. He says we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s also
set in Hawai‘i. “Left to my own devices, all of my work would be about
Hawai‘i,” he says.

He explains that it doesn’t matter how long
he’s lived away or where else he travels. “I’m rational to a fault, so I don’t
want to use the word ‘spiritual,’ but I might have to—I feel a body-and-soul
connection specifically to Maui. What else would I write about?”